About the Blogger

My name is Hala Furst, and I am a 3L. Before coming to Roger Williams I received a BA in Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota. In the three years between graduating from college and arriving here in Bristol, RI, I worked as a hotel concierge for a luxury brand, a loan officer and mortgage...

Hala's Post

The End is Near (But Not Yet Here)

Posted by Hala Furst on 05/15/2008 at 12:00 AM

Hi everybody. As you know it has been finals time around these parts, and we just finished last Saturday. It still seems strange to think that I am finished with my 1L year. It hasn’t really hit me yet, for a variety of reasons, but one of which is that this week is the Law Review Write-On competition, so many of us are still working 14 hour days trying to get onto next year’s Law Review by submitting a comment or a note. It’s interesting work, but to be completely honest, it is exhausting. I think they do this on purpose; make you submit right after finals, when you are already emotionally, physically, and intellectually drained right down to empty. It shows you really want it, I guess, which most of us do. You’ll find in law school that sometimes it just hurts so good. Students really do get a kick from how much misery we can endure.

I intended to write immediately following finals, but I didn’t. I’m not entirely sure why- I think I haven’t really had time to process the fact that I’m looking backwards at my first year of Law School. I also haven’t been in the best place lately, because of the aforementioned exhaustion (which isn’t code for ‘partied out’, like it might be in Hollywood), and because grades have returned, and again, the same nausea-inducing panic, green-eyed jealousy, and crippling self-doubt has returned from last semester. Do me a favor (which I know you won’t): don’t look at your grades until someone tells you they are all up, or at least most of them are up. Pretty please do not look at them at least until you have finished writing for Law Review, if you so chose. Wait until you are lying on a beach somewhere, or at least in the 30th floor designer offices of the Big Name Firm with which you have a summer associate-ship; just wait until you are somewhere happy, not sitting in the same pair of PJs you’ve worn for three days, un-showered and unfed, because you are waiting for your summer loan funds to come in and all you have been doing is reading about some really depressing crime, looking for a way to say something that hasn’t been said before. That is not the best time to look at grades, I’m just saying. You should be clean at least.

Thats all I have for now. I’ll write again before I leave for study abroad in London on May 28th. At least I have that excitement to look forward to!